Supreme Commander Review

The long anticipated unofficial follow up to Cavedog's Total Annihilation is finally upon us, and it turns out to be a truly mammoth real-time strategy experience. We've had the final build in the office for a few weeks now, and have been regularly eschewing normal work duties to get in just one more skirmish. Along with Supreme Commander's dizzying depth and balancing comes a significant learning curve, something that may unfortunately turn away the casual gamer. If you're an RTS fan at all, you really owe it to yourself to check out the strategic juggernaut Gas Powered Games has created. Though its single player campaign is far from spectacular, the multiplayer and skirmish modes in Supreme Commander deliver some of the deepest, most refined RTS gameplay in recent memory.

If you've played the demo released a few weeks back, you'll know what you're in for. Gas Powered Games created a mob of units for each of the game's three factions, the Cybran, United Earth Federation, and Aeon. Though each may seem similar at the lowest technology levels, there still exist a number of differences. As players proceed through up to the maximum tech level 3 (T3) and beyond to the experimental units, more variety becomes apparent. A few Aeon units can hover, for instance, letting them traverse the watery canals snaking through many of Supreme Commander's maps. The Cybran get T2 naval units that can sprout legs and march across land, albeit extremely slowly. The UEF get one of the most powerful non-experimental units, the T3 gunships, which boast devastating air-to-ground attacks as well as anti-air defenses. Despite their ferocity on the battlefield, can easily be wiped out by a force of T3 air superiority fighters or a battery of SAM launchers.

Even though there's an effective defense for every attack, including against nukes, the only way you're going to make proper use of them is to gather intelligence. A victory in Supreme Commander isn't all about massing giant forces to toss at your enemy, it's much more about precise reconnaissance and intelligent strategic planning. Given the staggering scope of the abilities of units, artillery batteries, point defenses, missile launchers, naval units, and experimental monstrosities, knowing exactly where your opponent is and what he or she is up to is of much more importance than in less sophisticated RTS games.

That being said, it's not like creating a sprawling troupe of units to mount an attack is a bad idea. It's actually highly entertaining, and one of the great payoffs of this game to see the fruits of all your technology upgrades, delicate resource management, and build queuing mature into a rumbling mass of robotic assault bots, boats, and planes moving with the singular purpose of obliterating your enemy. Getting to that point is a beast of a process, however, something the hardcore strategy gamers will be sure to appreciate, whereas more casual players might not be willing to invest the time.

Resource management, for instance, approaches near scientific heights when trying to balance rates of mass and energy accumulation, along with adjusting your storage capacity for each. At a game's outset you'll be striving to capture as many mass extraction points as possible, while setting up a big energy surplus. As T3 is reached, your advanced engineer units can set up power plants that yield much more significant energy bonuses, and can also construct what are known as mass fabricators that convert energy to mass. Since each unit in the game requires energy to run and mass to construct, keeping your resource reserves properly stocked is vital for producing your attack and defense forces in a timely fashion. It means nothing if you've pumped all your resources into erecting a T3 artillery station when it causes everything else in your base to build five times more slowly.

With such a focus on base building and handling resources, you're going to need some especially utilitarian construction units. Supreme Commander's engineers fill that role very well. Available in T1, T2, and T3 versions, every engineer has a vast range of abilities and build options. They can reclaim trees or other debris littered around maps, repair your forces, capture enemy structures and units, speed up build times at the expense of extra resources, and accelerate the rate of tactical and strategic missile construction and technology upgrades. Given such a broad functionality, these units would be unmanageable without an intuitive, dynamic interface to govern their actions. Again, Supreme Commander does not disappoint.

Effectively controlling the battlefield is achieved chiefly through the all-powerful Shift key. By pressing and holding, players can queue up unit movements, build orders, patrol waypoints, and combine move and attack orders. Should you decide to change movement patterns or build locations while the action is already underway, hitting shift again brings up an interface where you can drag around the waypoints as you see fit. Every unit construction factory can be given build order while it's still being built. Even after telling it to upgrade to the next technology level, you'll be presented with the next set of build options so you don't have to keep checking back in. Different types and amounts of units can be queued in the same construction facility, and a repeat build order function lets you move on to something else once you're happy with a factory's production pattern. Since you'll find a significant amount of water and hilly terrain across the game's many maps, there's an unusual emphasis on air transports. Thankfully these units can be set along ferry routes, where they'll automatically scoop up waiting units and drop them off wherever you so designate. If you set a factory waypoint to the starting point of the ferry route, units will automatically be ferried as soon as they roll or crawl off the production line.